Convert xBase to SQLite

Working from an xBase table

xBase is the family name for the record layout dBase defined and Clipper, FoxBase and FoxPro adopted. A file from any of them opens here; the differences live in the header bytes, and those are read rather than assumed.

• →Records deleted but never packed are still physically present, flagged with an asterisk. They are skipped, so the converted table holds the rows the application showed and not the ones it hid.
• →Clipper is the trap in this family: it wrote version byte 0x03 even for tables with memo columns, so a naive reader picks the wrong memo layout and dies with "unpack requires a buffer of 8 bytes". That case is handled here.
• →The header gives each field an 11-byte name slot, so xBase column names are at most 10 characters - a limit that follows the data into the target unless you rename the columns there.

What the .sqlite file looks like inside

The output here is a real database rather than a script, so the interesting question is not how to load it but what SQLite did with the types on the way in. Its storage classes are looser than the declarations the file ends up carrying.

• →Names are carried over exactly as they were, with none of the sanitising the script targets apply: a table called Sales Report keeps its space and a column called Order ID keeps its own, so your queries have to quote them.
• →Underneath the declared types sit only five storage classes, and NUMERIC affinity - what a decimal column gets - is the loosest of them: it normalises inserted text to whatever a plain INTEGER or REAL column would hold. The precision and scale in the schema are for a human reading it, not a guarantee SQLite enforces on the bytes; the Writing notes below cover what that means for money specifically.
• →Declared type and stored type are different things here: a BOOLEAN column holds the integers 1 and 0, and a DATE column holds ISO text, because those are the storage classes SQLite actually has. Every client reads them back the same way.

Reading xBase

• →Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
• →Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
• →The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
• →Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
• →Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing SQLite

• →Columns get real declared types rather than everything being TEXT.
• →Primary keys and NOT NULL constraints are preserved.
• →A money column is declared NUMERIC(10,2), but that declaration does not stop SQLite’s own numeric affinity from converting the inserted value into a float once it lands, so 19.99 can come back with a rounding tail. Pick the DuckDB target instead when the exact decimal has to survive.

Convert xBase to something else

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• DuckDB
• CSV
• Excel

Convert something else to SQLite

• CSV
• Excel
• SQL dump
• JSON
• XML
• Parquet
• DuckDB
• MS Access
• PostgreSQL backup